George McGovern: Chapter 1

Oct. 21, 2012

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By the time George McGovern was born in 1922, the Progressive Era that had swept the United States at the turn of the 20th century was coming to an end. It would return again during his boyhood in the New Deal years of the 1930s.

Eventually, the man born in Avon would ride the crest of a new progressive movement that came of age during the 1960s.

Born to a conservative Republican family and a father who was a fundamentalist Wesleyan Methodist preacher, McGovern’s boyhood was unlikely ground for a man who eventually would harness and lead a progressive movement born of racial strife and opposition to the Vietnam War.

McGovern was a Republican after World War II, where he served as a decorated bomber pilot. In interviews before his death, he would say that he wasn’t interested in politics before the 1952 presidential campaign. But that wasn’t a complete picture. In 1948, McGovern was interested enough in politics that he attended the Progressive Party national convention and supported peace candidate Henry Wallace. Wallace ran on a platform of not escalating the arms race with the Soviet Union, which agreed with McGovern’s views on U.S. foreign policy.

“I was a Republican,” he said in a 2011 interview with the Argus Leader. “Obviously, it’s because my folks were. But I didn’t agree with the Cold War and the arms race. You know, I came back after flying those missions ready to appreciate the peace. Instead of that, we started on this Cold War path and began putting over half of our federal budget into the military.”

As a college student, McGovern came into contact with figures who molded his political identity. During work on his doctoral degree at Northwestern University, McGovern studied under Arthur Link, a historian of the Progressive Era. Link oversaw McGovern’s dissertation on the Ludlow, Colo., massacre of coal miners, a work that was sympathetic to striking miners who were killed by company guards and the Colorado National Guard in 1914.

He also had a close relationship with another professor, Ray Allen Billington, a frontier historian. In a 2003 interview with historians John Miller and Jon Lauck, McGovern described the history department at Northwestern as a “liberal arena.”

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In a letter to Billington in 1952, McGovern wrote: “I shall always feel that the Northwestern history department ‘saved’ my soul and you were, of course, the chief evangelist.”

Miller, a professor emeritus at South Dakota State University, said McGovern also was influenced by his Christian upbringing. While at Northwestern, he was swayed by the works of Walter Rauschenbusch, a Baptist theologian who was prominent among the Social Gospel movement that sought to use Christianity to solve social problems. That, Miller said, would be a mark of McGovern’s political career.

“I think McGovern found ideas and a practical application of Christianity in society and the world,” Miller said.

Thus molded, McGovern became a Democrat in 1952, inspired by the party’s presidential nominee, Adlai Stevenson. McGovern became Stevenson’s chief spokesman in South Dakota, in part because no one else was acting in that capacity. He also wrote newspaper articles about why he had switched from being a Republican.

His work during that time caught the attention of Ward Clark, the state Democratic chairman. Clark asked McGovern to give up his teaching job at Dakota Wesleyan and become the party’s executive secretary. His chief goal was to build a party that, since the 1930s, had become almost nonexistent in state politics. After a lot of thought and conversations, and with the blessing of his wife, Eleanor, McGovern left Dakota Wesleyan in 1953 and take the post of executive secretary.

His party-building skills during those years became the stuff of legend. He was constantly on the road, meeting people and keeping a file of three-by-five note cards that he used to build a party organization. His first goal was to identify Democrats or potential Democrats and to then ensure the party ran a full slate of candidates. He also would try to persuade Republicans that they were better off with competition.

“I never was hostile to the Republican Party,” he said in 2011, “because I honestly believe that the two-party system in the United States is the best system because of the competitive factor.”

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Given the realities of the political dynamic in the state, he also knew that Democrats would have to appeal to Republicans to be successful.

By 1956, McGovern was ready to put his organizational skills to use in his own campaign. He challenged Republican incumbent Rep. Harold O. Lovre in what was then South Dakota’s 1st Congressional District.

McGovern was striking out into politics at a promising time. Many farmers who had voted for Dwight Eisenhower in 1952 were disenchanted with his farm policies. Lauck, who wrote a 2002 essay for the South Dakota State Historical Society, noted that it gave McGovern an opening at a political office. “Many farmers felt betrayed in 1953 when Eisenhower’s secretary of agriculture, Ezra Taft Benson, attempted to dismantle the farm program in order to give farmers the ‘freedom to farm,’ ” Lauck wrote.

McGovern won the race, and a subsequent election in 1958 against Gov. Joe Foss, a victory that many of his colleagues in the House found improbable, McGovern said. Thomas Knock, a history professor at Southern Methodist University and a biographer of McGovern, said McGovern was helped in the race by showing leadership during his freshman term on agriculture issues.

By 1960, McGovern was ready to move up, this time by challenging Republican Sen. Karl Mundt. He lost to Mundt by more than 10 percentage points.

Regardless, 1960 was a crucial year for McGovern. He developed a close relationship with the Kennedy family, and John F. Kennedy won the presidency that year. Kennedy later appointed McGovern as the first director of the Food for Peace program. For McGovern, it kept him in a national post and, importantly, it allowed him to continue to work on agriculture issues.

The program fit with McGovern’s domestic and foreign policy goals. Creating new markets for American commodities would help farmers. At the same time, McGovern believed food aid to poor, countries would generate goodwill and allies, an important but less aggressive way to counter the Soviet Union.

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McGovern was back at politics in 1962 with a challenge to Sen. Joseph Bottum, who had been appointed to fill out the remaining term of Francis Case, who had died in office. McGovern won by fewer than 800 votes.

Less than a year into office, McGovern already was warning about the issue that would carry him to the Democratic presidential nomination a decade later: Vietnam. The man who came to question America’s foreign policy through Wallace in 1948 was appalled by America’s use of military power on a country that he, in 2011, described as “primitive.”

Still, McGovern’s own record on Vietnam was not unblemished when it came to the anti-war movement. In 1964, McGovern voted for a resolution authorizing military action in Southeast Asia. Known as the Tonkin Resolution, the issue was controversial and blamed for enabling presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon to escalate the war.

McGovern went on to win a second U.S. Senate term in 1968. But the months before that election put McGovern on a national stage. From there, he would take the leap to presidential candidate four years later.

It came out of tragedy, when Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in June. McGovern entered the presidential race late, hoping to rally the anti-war groups that had supported Kennedy. He finished a distant third during the national convention’s balloting, but it was a finish that would pay off four years later. “That’s sort of how he became a big figure in American politics,” Knock said.